Bookshelf:'Florida Life of Thomas Edison' a fascinating read

Thursday

May 28, 2009 at 3:15 AM

By Jacquelyn BensonShowcase Book Critic

When I first picked up "The Florida Life of Thomas Edison," by Dover author Michele Wehrwein Albion, I thought the book was going to be a bit dry — really, what could be that interesting about an elderly couple and their Florida winter home, even if half of that elderly couple was the inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph? We're talking about a pair of snowbirds, here.

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I hear the word "snowbird," I'm thinking of Buicks driving under the speed limit and Blue Blockers. Light bulbs and domestic sources of rubber — two of Edison's famous creations — are slightly more interesting, but not enough to keep me going for 200 pages. That just makes it all the more surprising that Albion's book turned out to be such a fun, fascinating read.

The heart of the story is the relationship between a man and a town: Edison and the city of Fort Myers, located on Florida's west coast. When Edison first chugged up the Caloosahatchee River, Fort Myers was a backwater populated by — well, mostly cows. His decision to build his winter house and laboratory there turned the dusty little berg into a celebrity vacation hot spot.

I know what you're thinking — the guy who invented the light bulb was a celebrity? Oh yes, indeed. We're talking Angelina Jolie stuff, here. The citizens of the town threw parades. Huge crowds of them would gather to meet his train when he showed up for the winter. Paparazzi would follow him to his house and beg for interviews. It sounds a bit like what would happen in Portsmouth if Johnny Depp ever did actually show up here for a holiday, except that Thomas Edison wasn't a hot movie stud muffin. He was an old guy who spent most of his time hanging out in a laboratory.

But, as often happens with celebrities, even nerdy ones, Edison wasn't the first. Not long after he established his "Seminole Lodge," Henry Ford decided to put in a vacation home just down the road. Yes, I mean Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company. This guy was so hot, he had to disembark from his private train car up the road from the station and walk to his house to avoid the hordes of Model-T fanatics gathered to fawn over him when he showed up. Hot early 20th century Fort Myers celebrity number three was Harvey Firestone, the tire dude. Edison, Ford, and Firestone's lackluster fishing expeditions were headline news for the local paper. It's nice to know that our own nutty celebrity habits aren't unprecedented.

Edison's decision to site his winter house in Fort Myers lead to a massive boom of the town, the first on Florida's west coast. What we know and love now as an unending stretch of strip malls and timeshares was once a wilderness populated by tropical birds and panthers. It took three days to cross from one side of the state to the other — and that was by train. Over the 40-something year course of Albion's book, we watch that wilderness turn into a more familiar landscape, with this quirky deaf inventor sitting at the heart of it.

See? Really pretty cool. What's also surprising about the book is how funny it is. Most of the credit for that belongs to Edison himself, who in addition to being great at making light bulbs also possessed a marvelously geeky sense of humor. There's the way he asked his second wife to marry him, for example — by typing his proposal out on her hand in Morse code. He stuffed his former pets, which included several monkeys and a gopher, and used them to decorate this house. And then, there's his obsession with catching a tarpon, a less-than-tasty Floridian fish with a tendency to grow to enormous sizes.

In The Florida Life of Thomas Edison, what seems like a tiny, obscure topic that would only prove interesting to utterly unapologetic history nerds turns out to be a quirky, fun, sprawling portrait of late 19th and early 20th century life.

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Michele Wehrwein Albion will be joining three other New Hampshire authors June 8, 7 p.m., at the River Run Bookstore. For details, visit www.riverrunbookstore.com or call 431-2100.

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